Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I wish I would have taken pictures before the start of the school year when everything was nice and clean! I've made a few changes this year - all pinterest inspired!!

This is our morning meeting area, calendar area, classroom library - the hub-bub of the room. I love love my new carpet!

This is our calendar area. And the yellow and blue strips in the pocket chart is our daily schedule that we read every morning during our morning meeting.

My benches hold part of our classroom library. You can see the headphones behind the bench - this doubles as our listening center area. The CD/tape player is sitting on the floor to the left of the benches. The blue pocket chart is a regular sized one that I folded to make shorter. I use this every day to sort pictures into beginning sound categories, build sentences with our star words, etc. You can also see my reading strategies by the tree.

Here is my word wall - pinterest inspired! I use velcro to attach my words so that I am not messing up the paper - I am hoping the paper will last a long time - this took forever to put up and I don't want to do it again for a long time!

My number cards that I made - pinterest inspired as well. You can also see my vowel cards that I made and my "sound-spelling" cards that I made that go around that small blue pocket chart. We refer to them when we do our interactive writing.

Our "star words"

This is our pocket chart center. I have been creating a pocket chart story that goes with each theme we are working on - it has done wonders for my kinders in regards to reading those color words. I also make a book for their browsing boxes that matches the pocket chart story. You can see the zip-loc bag hanging by the pocket chart- that holds the words to the sentence strips. They are to match the words to the words on the strip!

My shelf that holds our Star word books, ABC book (abc pages to work on each letter) and on the bottom are our "Activity Workbooks" that go with our reading series

This is the wall to the right when you walk in. It has my Literacy and Math workstation rotation boards.

Lucky Ducks and my morning work. Students check here every morning to see what their morning work is for the day.

Math calendar books. You can also see my write the room cards for math and literacy - it was "M" week and our theme was Monsters!

The blue and red tubs are for literacy workstations

The green and yellow tubs are for math workstations

This is how I organize my workstations. The top paper shows my literacy rotations (they last for 2 weeks) the bottom is math workstation rotations. The center paper tells what is in each tub - this is all beneficial if I have a sub

Our classroom bucket - we are filling it very quickly this year!!

This is my voice meter that I made - it works very well!!

Our writer's workshop check list - Are you sure your story is finished?

This was pinterest inspired - this took 4 mini-lessons. I did one page a day (large size) and then I made copies of the pages (shrunk them) and made the starts and it is a perfect anchor chart for Writer's workshop. We also did the Rate your writing one day for a mini lesson. You can hear my students all the time saying "wow that is star work" or "That is not very good star work" they are harder on each other than I am!

These are my baskets that sit on the window ledge behind my small group reading table. There is one for each group. I put our supplies in them for each reading group for the week - keeps me organized!

This is the shelf below my group baskets. Sorry - the bottom shelf is a mess!!!!. The baskets on the shelf above hold leveled books that we pick out to put in our browsing boxes.

This is our retelling station

housekeeping

My mailbox that I made a few years ago!

These are hanging right next to the door - stores all of the important information that I need at my finger tips

Our focus for the week needs to be posted for visitors

Pete the Cat - not sure what wonderful blog I got this from :(

My new chairs. Students who are at the listening center can choose to listen to books on CD's after they finish their listening center story and response sheet. Or they can choose to read books in the library or do retell - which you can see the legs of the retell easel in the background

My new organization tubs that I got this year - love them - they are from Lakesore

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Here are our last two wall stories. We read The Season's Of Arnold's Apple Tree to create the murals of all 4 seasons of trees. We also read Go Away Big Green Monster and created a retelling of the book.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Back to school and loving my new group of kinders. We are moving along and coming together as a family. I will be posting my classroom tour pictures soon! Until then you can enjoy my welcome bulletin board. I am very pleased with it, I think it turned out beautiful!

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

SOOOOO I'm a little embarrassed! I never ever claimed to be a great speller - as a matter of a fact if you look through many of my posts I am positive that you will find spelling errors. What can I say - I am a terrible terrible speller. I certainly never won a spelling bee. Well there was a spelling error on my behavior clip chart. So if you downloaded it before you need to go back to the post here and download it again. So sorry everyone!

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Okay, so I have been wanting to give all of you a freebie to celebrate 100 followers! However, whenever I download my documents to google docs it comes out all distorted. My font is different and all over the place. I know the way to fix this is to convert it to a pdf, but my computer will not let me do it. It is my school computer and that function is not on my computer and I can not download any pdf converter - not even the free ones. SOOOO, with that said, I am putting my freebie here for you, but you will have to go in and change the font to work for you -- I am so sorry --- but this way it allows you to use the fun fonts that you wish to use. I hope many of you can use this freebie

I would love to know if you download it and if you were able to fix the font! Enjoy!

Ooooh, I just noticed that my polka dots on the large colored border did not show up. When I made the sign I went into line color and clicked on the line that says "patterned line" and I was able to make that solid line a polka dotted line!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

So one of the things on my summer to do list is to make the behavior clip chart. Here is a few pictures of what I have done so far. My question is --- how do I hook them together? I have seen them put together with the rings, or put onto ribbon. I really like the ribbon idea, but will it lay flat? And how do you adhere the cards to the ribbon? Would hate to put a staple through the cards. What about velcro tape? Will it stick or will it pull off when they are clipping up and down? Need some help and advice here!!! Thanks in advance!

I printed up the signs and then glued them to colored card stock for durability - I still need to laminate

The "Outstanding" says "Top Notch Behavior" I am planning on displaying their clips once the reach the top under a caption that says "Top Notch Students" I will show a picture of that once I have it ready to go! The "Great Day" says "You're being a great role model!" and the "Good Day" says "Showing Pride"

For the yellow card most of them say "Slow Down" or "Time Out" or"Think About It" I wanted to use "Reminder" because to me it sounds more positive.

About Me

I have been teaching for 14 years and love kindergarten. I have 3 wonderful children and an amazing husband who just "loves" to make items for my classroom. I like to take long walks to clear my head and relax. I love to go camping and go on nature walks. Early mornings and late nights spent around the campfire visiting with my family is one of my favorite summer time activities.